I have quite a problem of remembering much of my childhood. Actually, I fail to remember many things from my past that I was indifferent about. And I was indifferent a lot. It often happens that I can’t remember my day at school when I come home, but I perfectly remember what I’ve been thinking about in classes. It’s just that I neglect my surrounding so much that I stop being aware of it. And it’s only natural that I won’t have any memories of what I’ve been doing there if I was on “auto-pilot” to put it that way.

But, this is how I’ve been functioning since always, and as my memory is quite selective I forgot many unimportant memories. They still do come back if something reminds me of it. It can astonish me sometimes, as if those were someone else’s memories.
I did keep remembering some things, but that amount is very small. That might be because I’ve never had a habit to look back into the past. I would only install the important information into my brain and discard everything that I might not find useful in the future (at least what I thought I won’t then). Some things were just plain fun, and that refused to stay the most. That is something which I needed to remember now that I realized I am a sociopath.

I was trying to recall some events that might help me remember if I had some sociopathic traits in the childhood. And it wasn’t going too well as I realized I almost have nothing to remember. No material for examination. So I gave up and went with watching the TV. All of a sudden a flashback strokes me at the sighting of an ant colon on the TV. There were the memories I needed. I had sociopathic tendencies ever since I was little, now I was 100% sure. I thought I’ve never tortured animals, but under animals I counted only larger animals; mammals and birds. But what about insects?

I remembered how I enjoyed playing with ants in front of my house as a kid. There were two separate colons, and I found the one with bigger ants later. In the beginning, while I had only those barely visible ants I would demolish their shelter and watch them trying to dig their way out and the ones out to find a hole. But when I found those larger ants (around 1.5cm) I changed my way of playing. I was cutting off parts of their bodies with a thin stick and watched them walk around in panic until they’d die. I also disturbed the whole colon and watch them attacking the stick in my hand but unable to do anything. I enjoyed knowing they are in my mercy and that I was the one bringing fear and commotion in their peaceful life just because I felt like it.

Other than ants I was torturing large bugs, ripping their wings and legs off and watch them die. Or breaking snails’ shells with a fork or covering them with salt. I had so much fun doing all this, and zero conscience.
Mother taught me not to torture animals, she even taught me to be very fond of them. But, she never mentioned insects, and no one seemed to pay attention to stomping on them. Even killed them on purpose. But others were simply killing them coldly, I thought of why don’t they have fun first as I did? But I never asked of course. It made me smarter, and it made me better than the rest.

I wasn’t falling behind with menacing other children either. Starting from kindergarten I was the silver-tongued one, but I would freak out if some kid decided to disobey me, and would give into physical violence without thinking. So instead of going there for two years parents signed me out for the second one. Then I went to preschool at sixth year of life. I was again violent, but more controlling and I used verbal violence if I could fix it like that. But I was cleverer then. I would manage to make teachers there like me, and would bother kids only when they weren’t watching. It all continued through elementary school, but kids there hated me, and even older ones were picking on me, calling me a freak, a monster, a lunatic, always in groups. I would lay my hands on one of them though and while the others were beating me I wouldn’t let go of that unlucky one, quite commonly bringing serious injuries onto her/him. In the end they’d always just try to detach me from that one kid. But I would scream and laugh, not paying attention to my painful bruises until it was all over. And yet, my mother always managed to make me seem as a victim. After all, I was just defending myself from the group of four or five kids attacking me. She even threatened to one girl which was the fifth grade when I was the second one, and that I got into a fight with.
In the fifth grade I calmed down and stopped fighting almost completely. In the seventh though, a guy I hated kicked my dog and I kicked him in the knee almost breaking it. He hit me with a bag and caused my cheek muscle to snap in two. Luckily I have no visible scar, but there is still a 2cm wide cut that can be felt under the skin tissue. I was furious and was unable to stop crying, promising I’d kill him one day. And again, even though I had started the fight, I ended up as a victim as he was a problematic child from the foster family.

Remembering all this made me realize I was, after all, a child with those traits, and not only the triggers in later years turned my sanity upside down. I never had conscience or empathy for humans. I despised them and toyed with them from the very beginning of my social life. But I have had a speck of emotions for my family still. Then came high school and the casual mask creating started. I wrote about that in the post “Being a Social Chameleon”.

But I was missing on early childhood part so much that I know now: One does not simply become a sociopath because of a few traumas. That’s the way for PTSD. Sociopathy is definitely something one pulls from the genes, and it only gets triggered to worse, but it’s there even without it. It is there for the whole life. Right from the second child breaths in for the first time.